


i'm just a vessel still, guess i need to be filled

by boos



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Character Study, Dissociation, F/F, Gen, Mental Health Issues, Meta, Metafiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-19
Updated: 2018-10-19
Packaged: 2019-08-01 21:21:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,662
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16292033
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/boos/pseuds/boos
Summary: “When did you and Jughead get together? Why?” Kevin asks her one day, laughing like it’s a ridiculous joke. “When did you even startlikingJughead?”Because that’s what’s supposed to happen. Because that’s part of the story, isn’t it?Betty smiles, white teeth and all.





	i'm just a vessel still, guess i need to be filled

**Author's Note:**

> ur probably like What Is This and i'm like God I Wish I Knew but man i thought wouldn't that be freaky n fun if i wrote a badly written fic where betty kinda knew she was in a badly written tv show
> 
> title is from "someone tell the boys" by samia

Sometimes Betty is bogged down with this indescribable sadness.

Sometimes she’ll just wake up at four in the morning and lay in her twisted sheets until the sun comes up, until her mom starts making noise downstairs, until she sees Archie’s bedroom light pop on like a yellow burst out of the corner of her eye.

 _It’s time to start the day,_ an awful, little voice in her head tells her. _It’s time to wake up and be Elizabeth Cooper._

Betty thinks that if it were her choice she would never move from this spot.

But it’s not her choice, and her mother comes into her room like a hurricane, shaking her awake, shoving pills in her face, picking out her clothes for her like she’s still in second grade. And Betty watches, silent, letting her do so.

Her father has a cup of coffee downstairs while reading the newspaper, her mother scoops scrambled eggs and burnt bacon onto all of their plates, and there is a fourth seat at their table that has been empty for months, a fourth bedroom in their house that has been preserved for months, but nobody says a word. The radio plays on in the background telling them about the weather for next week. It’s going to rain on Friday.

“Isn’t your dance on Saturday?” Alice asks, looking at Betty across the table.

Betty tries to blink the sleep out of her eyes. "Yeah."

“Hm, well let’s hope that the rain has cleared up by then.” She bites off half a piece of bacon and then turns to her husband. “Hal. Did you hear that _Hermione Lodge_ came running back here? After her sleaze of a husband got caught on account of fraud? Typical. I heard she brought her daughter with her, too.”

Hal keeps his eyes glued to the newspaper. “Mhm,” he murmurs, taking a sip of his coffee.

Alice turns her attention back to Betty with sharp eyes. “If you see that girl at school, you better stay away from her. Hermione has always been trouble, I can’t imagine her daughter is too different.”

Words die in Betty’s throat as she thinks about how she’s supposed to give Veronica a tour around school today or how Veronica had entered Pop’s last night like she already owned the place. How Archie’s rapt attention was stolen by her presence immediately. How Betty hadn’t felt sad exactly, but confused. Disappointed. _This wasn’t how it was supposed to go,_ she had thought, watching as Archie's eyes became as big as moons under Veronica's gaze.

Then she’d looked up from the booth and up at Veronica’s face and thought, _Oh,_ and understood why Archie would want to stare at someone like that. Betty reckons she would too, if she were a boy in this story.

Betty drinks her orange juice and nods across at her mom. “I will.”

 

 

 

These are the things Betty Cooper knows about herself:

She is a good daughter, a good sister.

Her favorite color is pink, but the warmer kind. The kind that looks a little peachy.

She is in love with Archie Andrews.

She wants desperately to be on the cheer squad.

She’s on the honor roll and Weatherbee’s favorite student. He’d told her as much when she decided to single-handedly take on the responsibility of running the Blue and Gold at the end of last year.

Sometimes she feels like there’s something… off. Not wrong, but off. It’s a feeling that’s increased in size more and more over the past couple months, one that she finds is harder to shake these days.

But she’s resilient and ignores it anyway.

She misses her sister desperately, and she’s worried about her too.

She’s really scared to start her sophomore year of high school, but she can’t find the words to tell anyone.

She bought herself this black, lacy bra when she got back from her internship this summer, thinking of Archie the entire time. She hides it at the back of a drawer, hoping her mother will never find it.

She is in love with Archie Andrews.

She is in love with Archie Andrews.

She is in love with Archie Andrews.

 

 

 

Betty gets a new best friend, acquires a spot on the cheer squad, and asks Archie to the dance all in the span of one day. It makes her feel like she’s on top of the world. She looks across the girls’ locker room at Veronica with stars in her eyes and feels dizzy with happiness. Veronica just smiles at her and zips up the back of her uniform for her.

“Perfect!” Veronica giggles, hands on Betty’s waist for a fleeting moment that leave the ghost of touch, just like Veronica’s lips had.

Betty smiles so hard her cheeks could break. _This is what it means to be happy_ , she thinks. This is what all the girls in the movies get. _I’m going to be happy this time_ , she thinks.

 

 

 

But things start happening after that that she can’t control.

Archie falls in love with Veronica like it’s all he was created to do and Betty sits on the sidelines, disappointed but not surprised. If anything, watching the way Veronica stares up at Archie without regard for anything else makes her angrier. Betty digs her fingers into her palm and appreciates the sting.

She pulls out the black, lacy bra from the depths of her drawer and wears it to drown Chuck Clayton. She doesn’t know what possesses her to step on him, to push him under the water with the heel of her stiletto sinking into his skin. The whole moment feels far away, like it’s happening to somebody else and Betty’s just a spectator, watching on and holding her breath. Then she comes to, sees the fear in Veronica’s expression, and realizes what she’s done, that this body is hers and so are its actions.

Jughead Jones walks into her life like they’re best friends and not like they only communicate through Archie and about Archie. Suddenly he’s at her side all of the time, on the staff for the Blue and Gold, sharing milkshakes with her at Pop’s, climbing through her window and kissing her while holding her face softly in his hands.

She pulls back from the kiss and struggles to breathe for a second. Jughead smiles so, so brightly at her, like his whole world's just changed. She wants to shake him at ask how the two of them even got here, but she moves onto something else, to the investigation, because she knows she has to. She knows she shouldn’t poke and prod at these things.

But most of all, she has these impulses where all she wants to do is reach out and hold Veronica’s hand. They happen all the time: every time they hang out with each other and Veronica laughs at one of her jokes or every time the two of them are eating lunch and Veronica gives Betty half of a cookie. But a voice in Betty’s head tells her she can’t do that, and she agrees. She knows. She was made for someone like Archie Andrews, like Jughead Jones. She knows.

 

 

 

Sometimes she’s sure she can hear a laugh track playing over and over in her brain. Sometimes she’s sure someone is watching her life, privy to the intimate moments of her adolescence, to all the days she has that end in tears or all the moments where she thinks putting in a black wig will help her breathe better. _Why wouldn’t they stop it?_ She finds herself asking some nights. _Why wouldn’t someone see me like this and try to stop it?_

The laugh track runs in her head again, over and over and over, keeping her up at night. She stares at the ceiling, Archie’s bedroom light like a burning sun in the corner of her vision.

She wears a cross on a necklace that pools in the hollow of her neck as she lays in bed. She presses the cross into her skin, making a red imprint there, and thinks maybe it’s just God laughing at her from afar. Betty wonders what she did to deserve any of it.

 

 

 

Jughead’s hands are cold to the touch. “We’re going to figure this all out,” he assures her with kind eyes, “We’re going to get to the bottom of everything.”

Betty gives a faint smile, seeing how all the evidence is spread on the table in front of them, seeing how insane this would look to someone outside of all of this, seeing the scary determination in Jughead’s eyes, and thinks, _What are we doing?_

She thinks, _Why do we keep going after these things even though we know they will kill us eventually?_

She thinks, _Why don’t we just stay to ourselves in this quiet little town and go for milkshakes and see movies and study like we used to?_

She thinks, _Why do we have this burning desire in our throats to be bigger than what we can be?_

But she doesn’t ask any of these question. She lets Jughead take her hand and drive them into the forest, looking for clues about a dead boy neither of them ever really knew.

 

 

 

“Hey Betts, what was your internship again?” Archie asks her one day while they’re all at Pop’s. They always seem to be at Pop’s. He’s got an arm around Veronica, who’s giggling into his skin, and a shake in the other hand. It’s strawberry red just like his hair.

Betty smiles at him, confused at why he’s asking, but fond anyway. She opens her mouth to answer, but her mind goes blank. She blinks. “Uh.. I was working at a… a literary agency.” She thinks she remembers something about Toni Morrison.

“Right! Right.” Archie nods, taking another sip of his shake. “Ronnie was asking me about it and I couldn’t remember.”

Veronica stares at Betty from across the table. Her head is pillowed on Archie’s chest. “Did you like California? I’ve always wanted to go.” She says.

When Betty thinks of California, she pictures palm trees and blue skies like in a stock photo, but not any fine details. Not the apartment she was put up in. Not the ocean. Not the warm, dry weather. Not the traffic or the hills.

“Yeah,” Betty decides, smiling wide, “I loved it.”

She goes back home that night and tries to find pictures on her phone of L.A. or any touristy things she might have brought back home, but there’s nothing, no evidence of her even leaving for the summer. But she knows she went. She knows, she knows, she _knows._ Something inside of her is telling her so.

 

 

 

“When did you and Jughead get together? _Why_ ?” Kevin asks her one day, laughing like it’s a ridiculous joke. “When did you even start _liking_ Jughead?”

_Because that’s what’s supposed to happen. Because that’s part of the story, isn’t it?_

Betty smiles, white teeth and all. “I always had a secret crush on him when we were kids,” Betty says, but the words seem drowned out by jukebox to the side of their booth that’s playing Frank Sinatra.

“What about Archie?” Kevin asks, trying to follow the plot.

Betty slides her french fry around in the ketchup on her plate until its so soggy it threatens to fall apart. “Archie belongs to Veronica.” She thinks of Veronica, the pearls she wears around her neck, the sweet twist of her lips when she smiles, how she always smells like cinnamon. She thinks of Archie, the way he always used to make Betty knees weak like they were in some black and white TV sitcom. “We’re just friends.”

Kevin frowns. He takes a sip from his milkshake. Somehow, they are always, always at Pop’s.

“But you liked him so much,” Kevin comments, “I would know, I had to hear about it for _months._ ” He gives a dramatic roll of his eyes.

“I have Jughead now,” she says, unable to look up at Kevin as she does so, “Everything worked out the way it was supposed to.”

She can tell Kevin is staring at her funnily, but she doesn’t want to look up to face him. She doesn’t know what to tell him anymore, but she’s happy. She’s happy with how everything is.

_Right?_

The next song that plays is by Billie Holiday. As the notes start, Betty blinks back the sudden overwhelming urge to cry. Instead she stares down at the stained table top of Pop’s, still playing with the soggy fries on her plate.

 

 

 

Jughead’s face is tender and sore, a bruise blooming on his cheekbone that’s graced by the presence of a black eye above. His arm is around her in the booth and she can’t help but curl into it more, shoving her hands under his gaze.

“Jug, I think something’s wrong with me,” she whispers, opening her up palms to reveal the sticky divots of blood in her skin.

He kisses them sweetly and promises her everything’s going to be alright, but she wants to sob. She doesn’t know how to explain that the feeling is bigger than this. There is something bigger than all of them that’s going on and it tortures Betty every moment of her life.

All she can do is whisper, “You’re right,” and choke back the scream threatening to rip from her throat as he kisses her on the lips.

 

 

 

For Betty, every day is just about living to the next, but that’s hard to do when they days blend together like they’re melting more and more by the minute. She blinks and misses whole hours, opens her eyes to find she’s in a completely different place across down with a different person at her side and a different outfit on. She comes to in Jughead’s trailer, in the parking lot of the White Wyrm, standing in front of her locker. Sometimes she blinks and finds herself staring in the bathroom mirror, but it takes her a moment to realize that _she’s_ the girl in the reflection.

She has nightmares about Fred being shot, about being the one holding the gun. She has nightmares where she looks in the mirror and sees a black ski mask, one she’s unable to tear off. Sometimes, she has a hard time differentiating her dreams from her memories, but she always catches herself early enough to avoid worrying anyone. Betty thinks if she stopped even for just a second to try and make sense of everything that it would all fall apart at once.

“How are your grades doing, honey?” Alice asks her at the dinner table one night. She swipes her hand lovingly across Betty’s forehead, tucking a stray piece of ear behind her ear, and Betty can’t help but flinch at the contact.

Betty can’t remember the last time she went to class. She can’t remember what courses she’s taking. She can’t remember the last time she turned in an assignment or an essay or the last time anyone asked her to.

Betty clears her throat. “They’re good. All A’s.”

Alice smiles at her from the stove. “That’s my girl.” She says affectionately.

Betty looks down at her hands and sees the white scars littering her palms. She curls her fingers experimentally and feels how easily her nails shift into place. She curls them harder, just for a second, and thinks about how easily the scar tissue could break.  

She used to want to be valedictorian. She used to want to be a good person. Now all she wants to be is happy, and she doesn’t think she can even manage that.

 

 

 

One day she wakes up and Jughead starts wearing a leather jacket like it’s his second skin. One day she wakes up and he’s different in all of the wrong ways, has different goals, different morals, a different presence than the boy she’d grown up with her entire life.

“Hey, how’s your book coming along?” Betty asks him while they’re on a date once. “On a date” for them is just eating frozen TV dinners at the table in Jughead’s trailer, but it provides a domestic simplicity that Betty thinks she could get used to.

“Huh?” Jughead asks her through a mouth full of peas.

Betty laughs. She reaches across the table to idly take his hand in hers. “Your book,” she reminds him, “The one you started after Jason died. The reason you wanted to investigate everything in the first place.”

Jughead’s face flashes with some sort of recognition. “Oh,” he says, piling more peas into his mouth, “Well, I guess I just haven’t been working on it. I don’t have the time anymore with the Serpent stuff, you know?”

Betty nods. “I know,” she says softly, “I just thought — that it was important to you. The book. You worked on it all summer.”

Jughead studies her for a moment, his fork suspended in midair. “I’ll pick it up again someday, maybe, when I’m not trying to get my dad out of jail.” The venom in his voice makes her back down and stop asking questions. They just sit in silence after that, both shoveling peas into their mouths.

Betty wonders when FP became a good man, good enough for Jughead to want to be his son again.

She wonders when she missed Jughead change over night. She thinks of a boy in a knit whoopee cap who would always thumb at the holes in his sweaters, who was quiet but snarky, who didn’t rush into things with headlong stubbornness, who wanted to become a writer so bad that he and Betty basically stopped talking over the summer because he had been so jealous of her internship.

All of a sudden, she feels lightheaded sitting there at the table and excuses herself on pretense to go lie down. She stumbles into what used to be FP’s room and falls onto the bed, her body springing against the noisy mattress. She breathes through her nose, trying to calm the nausea that threatens to crawl up her throat.

She falls asleep eventually, her head cushioned on the unwashed sheets, and in a moment of delusion, she tries to will herself to dream of better times: the days back at the beginning of the year when Archie and Jughead felt like sure things and Veronica brought new and exciting possibilities to their boring small town life.

Instead she still dreams about the gun in her hand and the mask on her face and the blood on the floor.

 

 

 

Archie looks her dead in the eyes and says he wants to kill the Black Hood. Betty squirms in the passenger car seat, feeling like her eyes could slip close any moment and she’d fall asleep right then and there, even though Archie’s plotting cold-blooded murder right beside her. This is what their lives are like these days.

Then the Chordettes come on the car radio, the first few peppy beats of _Lollipop_ play through the shitty sound system of Fred’s old truck, and Betty shoots up in her seat, her heart beating so fast like it’s trying to burst from her chest.

Archie grasps her hand and looks into her eyes. “I’ll kill him.” He says with such firm determination Betty could suffocate between the words. She doesn’t have the energy to tell him, _No._ She’s not sure she would if she did. She doesn’t have the energy to say, _I wish you’d kill me instead._

 

 

 

Veronica and her are in her bedroom one day, doing homework but not _really_ doing homework. Veronica’s shopping for clothes online and Betty’s scrolling through her music library, just scrolling and scrolling and scrolling like she actually knows what song she’s looking for. It’s the first time they’ve hung out in weeks.

Veronica sighs all of a sudden and pushes her laptop away. She falls back against the pillows on Betty’s bed with a bounce, her hair splaying across them. Stark black against baby pink.

Betty looks up at her. “What’s up, V?”

Veronica doesn’t respond for a moment. Betty watches her chest move up and down with shallow breaths.

“I don’t know,” Veronica says. She just stares up at the ceiling of Betty’s room. “I think I’m just tired.”

Betty moves up to lay down next to her. She twists on her side to look at Veronica. Betty gets distracted by the curve of Veronica’s lips, and for a moment she thinks about reaching out and brushing her thumb across Veronica’s cupids bow, just the slightest touch. Who would it really kill?

Betty’s hand only makes it halfway, resting on the pillow in between them, as Veronica turns her head to look at Betty. Her lips are rose like wine.

“What is it?” Veronica asks.

Betty retracts her hand, curling it against her chest. “Nothing.” She whispers.

Veronica hums and the sound is sweet and low. She looks up at Betty from under her eyelashes. If Betty just reached out and used a finger to graze Veronica’s eyelashes, who would it really kill?

 _Her,_ some voice whispers in her head, _You are a ruined thing and you would ruin her._

Betty feels the scars burn half-moons into her palm on the hand she wanted to touch Veronica with. She squeezes it into a tighter fist against her chest. “I think I’m tired too.” She tells Veronica, her voice still barely above a whisper.

She watches the way Veronica’s eyelids flutter close, watches the way her pupils dance behind them and eventually settle, watches the way her eyebrows smooth out as she starts dozing off.

Betty guesses she falls asleep sometime after that, too, because the next time she opens her eyes, it’s already dark outside. She's half-awake and half-asleep in a way that makes everything feel unreal, like it’s a moment that exists between minutes. Veronica’s still laying on the other side of the bed in the exact same position she had fallen asleep in and there’s still feet of space between them on the mattress. Betty tries to move her legs to tangle them with Veronica’s, but she’s asleep again before she can even attempt the action.

When she wakes again, Veronica’s gone. Betty’s mouth feels cottony and gross. She twists her body to lay on her other side, just barely stretching out her heavy limbs. When she turns, she finds Veronica there, sitting on the edge of the bed. Her hair covers her face with black, inky strands, and she’s leaning forward with a hand hovering over where Betty’s shoulder was, like she had been trying to reach out and touch her. The hand remains still in the air above Betty and Betty looks at it with half-lidded eyes. She looks at Veronica, still unable to see her face or any sign of movement throughout her body.

“Is this a dream?” Betty asks without meaning to. It was supposed to just be a thought inside her head. Veronica's hand retracts just the tiniest bit.

Betty blinks and Veronica’s gone. She moves a hand over where Veronica had been sitting on her covers and tries to find warmth or any evidence that Veronica was there. She blinks and it’s morning again, and Alice stands beside her bed, peering down from up above her.

“It’s time for school,” she tells Betty, an eyebrow arched up and her mouth set in a mean, fine line.

Betty blinks, but when she opens her eyes her mother’s still there.

“Okay.” Betty says helplessly.

She watches as her mother picks out an outfit for her for the day that's pink in all the right places. Alice drags her out of bed and makes her sit down in front of the old vanity, wiping concealer under Betty’s eyes to cover up the hours of sleep Betty’s lost these past couple months that she doesn’t think she’ll ever get back. She watches as Alice curls her hair, blowing on and bouncing every curl in her hand to make sure it'll look perfect.

Alice sends her out the door that day with a kiss on her cheek and a brown lunch in her hand. Betty feels both the most like herself she’s felt in months and also like a terrible caricature of the girl she used to be, but she thinks it’s better than being nothing at all.

 

 

 

While Jughead’s asleep one night, Betty creeps into the trailer’s kitchen and shoots tendrils of whipped cream straight from the can and into her mouth. The open fridge door is the only thing that provides her with light in the pitch black, and she almost chokes on the whipped cream from giggling at the idea of Jughead walking in and seeing what she looks like right now: disheveled, only in a lacy, black bra with the first pair of Jughead’s boxers that she could find on the floor hanging around her hips, chugging down a whole can of whipped cream, looking like a horror movie monster from only being illuminated by the yellow light of the fridge.

She wanders around the kitchen aimlessly after that, her bare feet scuffing against the cold tile, licking the remnants of whipped cream off her fingertips. Betty finds Jughead's Serpent jacket hanging on the back of a chair by the table, and she plays with the material in between her thumbs. She eyes his old whoopee cap that’s laying slumped and defeated in the middle of the table.

Betty shuffles into the teeny tiny bathroom and closes the door as quietly as she can before she flips on the light switch. She looks into the mirror and does her standard procedure of blinking a few times at the image of the girl staring back at her before she can reconcile the girl with herself, and then she’s tugging the leather jacket over her bare skin roughly, pushing the beanie onto her head with messy haste.

She piles as much of her blonde hair into the beanie that it will hold, and as she tucks the last few pieces, she properly stares at herself in the mirror. A pattern of hickeys trail up from her chest and to her throat, each looking like the little raspberries Archie used to give her when they were kids.

Something about the image – her in the jacket, her in the beanie, her chest rising and falling with her breaths – makes her feel real for the first time in months. It makes her feel strong. She laughs softly at the how insane she sounds, even to herself, but then she tilts her chin up in the mirror and admires the sharp line of her jaw. She wonders if she would look better as a boy. She wonders if she would feel better as a boy.

If she was Jughead in this story and Veronica was Betty, maybe they'd find a happier ending for themselves. But that's not how these things work.

 

 

 

The next day she leans across the bar at the White Wyrm and says to Toni, “I want to be apart of this world.”

Toni looks back at her, wary as ever. “I don’t think –”

“I want to know _everything,_ ” Betty tells her desperately, thinking about the way the jacket felt on her skin last night. For the first time, Betty understands maybe why Jughead became what he did.

She will carve her place in this story with tooth and nail, if she has to. She will carve it with her own sharpened bones.

 

 

 

Dancing on the stage of the White Wyrm makes Betty feel more in control of her life than she has in months. She knows it’s ridiculous, standing in front of a room full of people who catcall and wolf whistle at her as she spins, round and round, in some Victoria’s Secret black getup she found in her mother’s closet, but when she looks from the stage and into the crowd, the look Jughead has set on his face makes her feel _powerful_. She wants to laugh like a sickening sound in her throat.

FP guides her off stage and Betty goes, gliding onto the bar floor with the comforting weight of a leather jacket on her shoulders. She’s only paused for half a second when someone grabs at her arm and drags her into a shadowy corner of the bar.

“What are you doing? Who _are_ you?” Veronica’s lips whisper furiously at her. “You’ve _got_ to snap out of – of – of whatever this thing you’re trying to pull of is!”

Betty blinks at her for a moment, trying to play catch up with her thoughts. “Veronica,” she says, like it’s an afterthought.

Veronica stares up at her, eyeliner and mascara smudged around her eyes. Her hands are curled into fists at her sides and Betty wonders what excuse she told Archie to run off from his side and to Betty's instead.

Betty's lack of response only makes Veronica angrier. “I don’t know who you are anymore,” Veronica says. Her eyes shine like they might spill over with tears and she’s shaking a little, Betty realizes.

Betty moves forward and holds her without a thought. She slides her arms around Veronica’s neck and Veronica’s rings her arms around Betty’s waist like they’ve done this a thousand times before, like their touches aren't reserved and often chaste. They remain warmly wrapped up in each other like that and no one thinks it weird. No one can tell how fast Betty’s heartbeat is as Veronica lays her head against the same spots where Jughead had left love bites on her last night.

“I don’t know who I am either,” Betty admits into Veronica’s hair, curling her fingers around locks of it. 

They stay like that until Alice finds them and drags Betty with a rough grip into the bathroom to change. When Betty comes out, Veronica's gone without a trace and Jughead is looking at her from across the room with hard eyes.

 

 

 

Jughead lays against the pillows on Betty’s bed, his bed head a ruffled mess. Stark black against baby pink. He smiles up at her with that perfect smile of his, and she wishes she could learn how to swoon over it like everybody else does.

She blinks and Jughead turns into Archie. She looks at Archie’s face and she thinks he remembers that he had freckles, once. She thinks she remembers that they used to be best friends, once, too, and that there was a time where she thought she wouldn't love anybody more than she'd loved him.

She blinks and both boys are gone, replaced by the noise of her phone buzzing against the white wood of her vanity, singing out the melodic voices of the Chordettes. She turns toward it, cautiously avoiding her own gaze in the mirror. She picks up her phone and answers with, “Hello?” as though she doesn't already know who it is, as though she doesn't already know what's written in the script.

_Hello Betty. It’s nice to hear from you again._

 

 

 

“Betty,” someone says to her through a thick layer of sleep, “Betts.” Someone is shaking her shoulder lightly.

Betty jolts awake to the sight of Archie sitting next to her in a booth at Pop’s, Jughead and Veronica on the other side. They're all staring at her expectantly. The jukebox beside their booth plays Elton John. _Bennie and the Jets._ Betty notices immediately that the usual neon iridescence of Pop’s has been replaced by a soft, warm glow, and strung up around the ceiling are colorful Christmas lights. They blink on and off, almost dancing to the beat of the music.

“You fell asleep mid conversation,” Archie says, laughing at her lightly. His gentle smile is something she hasn’t seen in so long that it surprises her at first.

“Oh,” is all she can say, looking around the table at all of them. Jughead has an ugly Christmas sweater on and Veronica gives her a smile in between popping sweet potato fries into her mouth.

Pop walks down the aisle to them. The Santa hat he’s wearing on his head jingles with every step. He stops at their table and disperses all of their milkshakes out to them, sliding one over to Betty – her usual vanilla – and she happily takes a sip as she suddenly realizes how thirsty she is. She makes a noise in her throat when the milkshake touches her tongue and doesn’t taste like what she’s used to.

Pop chuckles. “It’s eggnog, sweetheart. That’s what you ordered, remember?”

Betty nods like she does, her ponytail bouncing up and down. “Right, yeah. It’s good, Pop.” She assures him, and he smiles back at her before nodding his goodbye and heading back toward the kitchen.

Betty looks around the scene curiously. The last thing she remembered, she had thought it was… November maybe? Honestly, she’s not sure, but she didn’t think it was Christmas. She can’t even remember how she got here or what day it is. In the last inkling of a memory she has, Betty thinks she remembers that everyone was mad at each other, so she’s not exactly sure why they’re all here right now, choosing to have what seems like a poor imitation of a Christmas celebration together.

The table falls into a tense silence, but it seems to Betty that there’s no real anger there, just awkwardness. The tension only dissipates when Veronica clears her throat and asks Jughead how he thought he did on their final English essay of the semester. Betty sips on her milkshake, Veronica and Jughead argue about the book they were reading in class, and Archie goes in on a half of his hamburger. It occurs to Betty that this is probably the closest to normalcy they’ve had in weeks.

The four of them chat about everything that’s not murders and investigations and break ups. They talk like they weren’t all just yelling at each other three days ago or like they don’t all have these complicated pasts between them that tangle up like string. Instead, Jughead makes a joke that Betty laughs at, and Betty stops herself in surprise afterward, realizing that she can't remember the last time she heard herself laugh.

The song on the jukebox switches and _A Holly Jolly Christmas_ comes on. Betty suddenly remembers making a gingerbread house with Archie while listening to this when they were kids. She remembers the way he had eaten all the shredded coconut and how mad she had gotten at him.

Betty turns toward Archie at the same moment he turns toward her, his face alight with childish joy. He starts, “Do you remember that Christmas where we made gingerbread houses and –”

“Yes, yes,” Betty agrees, giggling before he even finishes the sentence.

The jukebox continues on, switching from Burl Ives to Bobby Helms to Peggy Lee, and Betty orders another eggnog milkshake and Jughead gets a hot chocolate.

Betty and Veronica are coming back from a trip to the bathroom when _Baby It’s Cold Outside_ comes on, and Veronica twists around to Betty just before they slide back into the booth and says with a smile, “Dance with me.”

Betty holds Veronica by the waist and they sway side to side in the middle of Pop’s. Veronica smells like cinnamon and cedar wood, like maybe a little bit of Archie’s cologne rubbed off on her, and she laughs so hard when Betty starts singing the duet of the song with her. Jughead and Archie watch on, only half interested. They seem to be in a world of their own as they talk to each other in low voices across the table. Archie keeps stealing Jughead’s french fries and Jughead keeps letting him with this small smile on his face.

Veronica taps her black kitten heels out to the beat. “Beautiful, what’s your worry?” Betty sings down to her.

“My father will be pacing the floor,” Veronica sings back, shrugging like she can’t help it, and then laughs immediately.

The diner bustles with quiet chatter around them, happy families eating dinner and kids drawing with crayons, everybody trying so hard to desperately feel normal in a town that’s breaking apart at the seams more and more each day. Sometimes Betty wakes up in the morning with the gut wrenching desire for everything to go back to the way it was, even if she has to sacrifice all the people she’s met and all the things she’s done since.

But dancing there, with the snow falling outside and this girl looking up at Betty with a grin like no other, Betty’s chest feels lighter than it has in months. In _months._

Maybe after this things will return to being hopeless again. Maybe this is the only good moment they’ll get out of these few weeks, but Betty thinks of all the things she’d endure just to see Veronica smile again, and it’s a lot. She’d endure a lot.

Veronica hums the song near Betty’s ear as they dance and only stops to giggle when Betty starts twirling her around. She looks beautiful as she smiles up at Betty, the Christmas lights around them twinkling in the reflection of Veronica’s eyes.

Pop Tate shuffles through the aisle with food trays. “I’m gonna have to kick you kids out if you keep getting in the way of my services.” He says after he waits on a nearby family, but there’s a smile on his face and he chuckles when all Veronica and Betty do in response is serenade him with a few verses of the song.

They return to the boys when the song finishes, and when Veronica makes Jughead sit on the other side of the booth so she can be next to Betty, Betty isn’t ashamed at the butterflies that litter her stomach.

Jughead orders another burger and Veronica falls asleep on Betty’s shoulder as more and more snow piles up outside. She feels so warm against Betty's side that Betty thinks maybe it might lull her back to sleep too, but she’s worried about where she’ll wake up, so she doesn’t. She watches the snow and she watches Pop greet everyone who comes in like they’re family and she watches Archie and Jughead laugh with their heads bent together, gasping for air, and she watches how serene Veronica’s face is as she sleeps.

This moment is for no one else but them.

 

 

 

Betty has a dream where there’s a girl laying on the ground in a black wig. The girl looks like her, but is not her. The world around them is white with hints of pink. Peachy pink.

Betty crouches down to the girl and moves her head around by the chin, seeing if there is any resistance. There isn’t; the girl just looks past her with dead, glassy eyes, and a mouth slightly open that's painted red at the lips. There is a cross on a necklace that pools in the hollow of the girl's throat and it is cold to the touch.

Betty smiles down at her, caressing one of her cheeks with the back of her hand. A little voice in her head tells her, _If you want to love yourself, you need to love her first,_ but Betty thinks that's bullshit. She knows who she is, and she has never been this girl. Someone made her this way and it was not by her choice.

Betty stands up and leaves the girl there, in the nowhere of the dream. Betty hopes that when she wakes up tomorrow, she can recognize herself in the mirror this time. She hopes that when she wakes, the bad things inside of her will have healed over to create a fleshy, white scar that will never be reopened again. She hopes that when she wakes, the moment will be hers and only hers.

**Author's Note:**

> if we don't messily project all of our baggage onto characters then i ask of you: Who Will
> 
> the last scene is based off of [this s3 promo of betty](https://www.instagram.com/p/BorbG_vnK3Z/?taken-by=thecwriverdale)


End file.
